“You have an unknown abdominal anomaly,” the booth reported. On the screen, an animated hypodermic needle with big googly eyes appeared holding a pointer, and it tapped at a grayish blob among other grayish blobs on the scan. Lines radiated from it. “This is the location of the primary anomaly. It is approximately 4.5 cm by 3 cm by 2.5 cm. Please submit to further analysis.”
An arm extended from the wall with a circular cuff in it.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Please submit to further analysis,” the booth repeated. “The cuff will draw a small blood sample in a painless and routine procedure.”
“Uh, no, thanks,” he said. He moved carefully around the cuff to push on the booth door, but it wouldn’t open. He pressed the emergency release, and still nothing happened.
“I’m sorry, but your condition requires precautionary isolation. Please remain calm while medical professionals are summoned,” the booth said.
“I do not consent,” he said.
“Consent is not required for type-five anomalies of probable nonhuman origin,” it said. “Please remain calm.”
Calm? Fergus thought. I am not having a good day with booths. He pushed the door again, then kicked it, then rammed his shoulder into it. It didn’t budge.
“This booth is now dispensing an aerosol agent to help you remain calm,” the booth said. There was a hiss, and a minty scent filled the air.
Bloody hell. Fergus held his breath and punched at the screen near the door. He raised his hands again, felt that familiar tingle, couldn’t fight it down. As he hit the panel, there was another bright arc of electricity, and the booth went dead at the same time as there was a click and the door swung open.
He stumbled out, took a deep breath of fresh air, and then noticed people staring in his direction. There were sirens somewhere down the hall, and glancing back, he saw a flashing red light atop the booth he’d just busted free from.
Feeling sick, Fergus ran.
Chapter 19
He took the steps down to the next level two at a time, his stomach in knots, his body parched, and his head spinning. Down here, away from the windows and views, the Martian city became more like the bright, busy honeycomb he knew and loved. Despite his fear, his heart rate slowed with his footsteps, and he merged into one of the currents of people flowing through the wide halls at an almost calm pace.
It’ll be okay, he told himself. He’d get back to the rent-a-bunk, lay low there until they heard from Alena, then with luck he and Mari could track down Arelyn and get out. He just needed to avoid any more complications.
There’s something alien inside me, he thought. How will that ever not be complicated?
The little paranoid voice in his brain, emboldened and shrieking, was convinced that everyone who glanced his way knew him for what he was: something wrong.
There was one more flight down to a food court. At this time of day it would be crowded, so he should be safe enough to get some water, catch his breath, try to pull his shit back together. Then he could grab some quick takeout and get back to Mari. And then . . . He didn’t want to think any further ahead, wasn’t sure he could bear the future at all right now.
If he even had one.
“Food court it is, then,” he mumbled, and he headed down the stairs toward that promise of brief sanctuary, trying to keep his pace casual, not draw attention. Turning a corner midflight, he stopped short just in time to avoid knocking over someone hurrying up from the other direction.
It was the clerk with the dumb hair from RedZoots. “You!” the man exclaimed, then grabbed at the arm of the person who was with him—a person who was wearing a blue MCA uniform, Fergus recognized belatedly. “That’s him! This is him! The Marsie terrorist who fried my shop!”
“Never even been near the place. You must have me confused for someone else,” Fergus said. The MCA officer’s expression was one of bored forbearance, as if he were just counting down the seconds until he could reassure the citizen he’d get right on his complaint and get away. Fergus gave him a sympathetic smile—Crazy locals, right?—as he stepped to one side, yielding the way, and he saw the officer’s expression shift from boredom to relief to realization.
“Hey,” the MCA officer said, and he turned on the stairs, his hand moving toward his weapon, though he didn’t draw it. “Hang on a second, sir.”
“I’m afraid I’m kind of in a hurry,” Fergus said. He could see that was the wrong answer as soon as the words were out of his mouth, and he hastily added, “. . . but I’m happy to help, of course.”
The officer was now facing him directly, sideways on the staircase with the clerk twitching in anticipation beside him, wearing a smug grin. In the center of the officer’s chest was the small, shiny button circle of a scene recorder.
Scene recorders kept a rolling cache of two minutes before uploading to central memory, theoretically to give officers discretion when dealing with personal or confidential matters and informants but typically treated as a free window for beating the crap out of someone while retaining plausible deniability. How long since Fergus had come around the corner? No more than thirty seconds.
The officer clearly didn’t miss his glance at the camera. “I’ll need you to accompany me to the zone station until we can clear a few things up,” he said, and his hand tightened on his pistol. Gone was the sir.
“I—” Fergus started to say, but what was there to say after that? How could he get out of this? Even if he ran away, he was in the officer’s image cache. If he went down to the station, they were going to connect the dots to the Dr. Diagnosis booth, and he was going to end up on a dissection table in an Alliance lab somewhere.
“He’s going to run away!” the clerk shouted, and he lunged forward, grabbing Fergus’s arm with both hands. Fergus lost his balance, started to fall, and took a half step down to try to save himself, which brought them both crashing into the officer.
The officer shoved them off and hauled his pistol clumsily out of its holster just as Fergus felt the dreaded tingling well up inside him like angry bees spilling out of a hive deep in his gut, and without thinking he reached out and ripped the button camera off the officer’s chest as sparks leapt off his hands and arms.
The RedZoots clerk shrieked and let go, falling upward on the stairs. Fergus shoved the stunned officer, who dropped his weapon even as he fell atop the clerk, and in that brief moment of freedom, Fergus leapt down the stairs and away as fast as he could, panic wrapping itself around his heart and squeezing like he hadn’t felt since that day he tried to reach his father in the sea.
The button camera in his fist burned like a coal, and he let the melted, obliterated bit of plastic fall somewhere behind him as he fled.
Alarms blared. In his wild panic, Fergus thought it was the flyby alarm at first, that the Asiig had come for him again. But no, he recognized the three-trill pattern from his days on the fringes of the Free Mars movement; it was a zone lockdown.
He reached the food court, and tried to worm his way as quickly as he could into and through the suddenly tense crowd. People began to murmur, and the tables thinned out, anger and anxiety the two clearest notes in the changing swell of noise.
Unwilling to be carried along with the tide of people back out into the wider public spaces, Fergus found a small alcove behind a row of food stalls and huddled in its darkest corner. He imagined crickets in the hall, in his head, and he put his hands over his ears. The thirst was unbearable.
When his pulse had finally stopped hammering in his throat, he peered miserably out from his shadows and watched as shop owners finished with their last few customers. An older, weary-looking woman pulled down a gate over the counter of her stand, Wrap-a-Tap-Tapas. “Another drill?” she complained.
“I don’t know,” the next man over said, wiping down the counter in front of his own food stall. “Someone said it was a runa
way infected with a dangerous alien parasite. Who the hell knows? Probably a training thing.”
“A friend up in the skydome said a squad of MCA soldiers is coming in, armed up, with sniffers,” Tapas Lady said. “Probably just clearing the decks so they can track down some poor Marsie who pissed them off and cut ’em down without witnesses.”
“You’re too sympathetic to them,” the other man said.
“It was their damned planet. You should be more sympathetic,” Tapas Lady said. She locked her gate. “Still, it doesn’t matter, drill or whatever. Day’s shot either way. See you when the lockdown’s over.”
Both walked away, parting near the stairwells. After a while, the area lights, sensing no activity, dimmed to conserve power.
The Dr. Diagnosis booth had been a potentially lethal error, another stupid move born out of Fergus’s own unthinking arrogance. If the MCA was bringing in sniffers, there was no way he could hide for long. If only he hadn’t dragged Mari along. She was resourceful, though, smart, a survivor. He had gotten her this far; she’d find Arelyn and get home again. They’d be okay. Right?
You’re so full of shit, he told himself. She has no cred, no idea how Mars works, how anything outside of Cernee works.
He didn’t know anyone he could call in Ares Five who could help him now. Alena was in this zone, but she’d hand him over; she couldn’t afford not to. His shit was entirely his own.
If they were going to hunt him down, he was going to make it as difficult as possible for them. He inched along the wall until he could see a maintenance closet across the way. Time was worth more than stealth. He bolted across the concourse, bringing the lights back to glaring life, and looked around for anything he could grab as he passed the shuttered stalls. There was a gelato stand just past the tapas booth where someone had left a half-full bottle of water. He grabbed it and a handful of spoons, scattering more on the floor, and kept running.
The maintenance door was miraculously unlocked.
Racing into the darkened space, he tripped over an inert dustbot and sent himself crashing the remaining distance. He rolled over and found what he’d desperately hoped would be here: a rusted, greasy hatch in the floor leading down into the city’s underground. He could hide for a little while among the pipes and tunnels and machinery that kept the city above alive, and maybe even escape the zone before he was found.
He drank the water down in big, noisy gulps, then dropped the bottle into the closet’s industrial-size flash recycler. Marginally less ill, he hauled the hatch open. A line of rungs set into a sandcrete tunnel led down. The underground was vast, complex, and dark, but not infinite; the nearest MCA base was at Ares Four, outside Schiaparelli Crater, so he couldn’t waste what head start that gave him. He knew the underground well, but without a suit, he was ultimately trapped.
An awful thought occurred to him: what if they found Mari? The RedZoots clerk had surely described them both, and who knew how many people had seen them together? Worse, there was nothing he could do. He was useless to her, playing for time because it was the only thing he had left, and not much of it at that.
Every city had its invisible people crouching in the dark places, either dreaming of a life above or hiding from one. Fergus had once spent weeks down here, living among them while stalking a dealer of stolen art. Now, though, everyone he came near would be a potential MCA target or informant.
Closing his eyes, he leaned against a giant, humming brick of a machine and pictured the tunnels and crawlways and spots where people gathered, trying to recall the gaps and empty spaces.
There was only one place he could think of to hide. He turned back, retraced his steps for a hundred meters or so, then took a different way. The only uninhabited corners down here were the dangerous ones. Sixth inning, semifinals against the Titan Tigers, he thought. He’d had tickets to the sold-out Marsball game, a self-reward for catching the art thief, and was sitting in Section E when an atmospheric transformer below Section B blew and nearly suffocated half the people at that end of the ballpark. The explosion had done major structural damage beneath the park, and it had stayed that way while a circus of finger-pointing, rhetoric, and legal action slowly played out between the city, the machinery contractor, and the operations subcontractor. In the meantime, they’d just locked the area off and forgotten about it.
It didn’t take Fergus long to find a gate installed between two support columns, sporting a mechanical lock easily picked with a snapped-off piece of stolen polyplastic cutlery. He closed the gate behind him, locking it again from the inside. That would buy him a few more minutes, maybe.
The last few working lights were just inside the gate, shining feebly onto a thickened patchwork of steam burns and moisture-fed mold. He was loath to touch the walls to help find his way. I wish I had Mother Vahn’s glowing lichen goo, he thought, but that was a lifetime away now.
How badly, though, did he need that light? Was this thing the Asiig had done to him something he had any control over, or would it just be one unpredictable disaster after another until someone put him out of his misery for good? The Vahns secluded themselves to protect the rest of humanity from whatever “gift” they’d been given. How much weaker was he that, only a few days later, he was already yielding to temptation?
He held out one hand, palm up, and concentrated. He didn’t know which frightened him more: the thought that it wouldn’t work, or that it might. In answer, a tiny spark leapt from fingertip to palm, the white-blue arc enough to destroy what little acclimation to the dark his eyes had built up. It was also enough to light up his surroundings in a single brief flash of sharp relief.
Don’t think about how this moment changes you forever.
“Okay. That way, I think,” he mumbled to himself, trying to change the subject on his own thoughts. Sharp pinprick spots danced at the periphery of his vision as he cupped his hand, held it outward, and did it again.
A dark stain at the edge of the shadows proved to be a puddle of water. The air was humid here and growing warmer as steam leaked from somewhere ahead; it would make body-heat-seekers useless, scent-chasers not much better. He was careful to stay out of the puddle, not wanting to track sludge into a trail. He was so thirsty he could cry, thirsty enough to wonder if the puddle, which had glinted oily and iridescent in his brief light flash, would kill him faster or slower than the MCA soldiers. He moved on quickly.
Hopping over another flooded section of corridor, he tripped over something unseen on the far side. A cable snaked across the corridor only a half meter past the edges of the water. He made more light, illuminating the melted and blackened cable casing, and felt a sympathetic tingling in his hands. Live, then. And very, very hot.
Using the toe of his shoe, careful to touch only the section of the cable still bearing insulation, he nudged it into the pool. Steam began to boil off the water’s surface almost immediately. That would give him more cover.
In the depths of the damaged area, he found what he was looking for: a niche tucked between dead, half-slagged machinery. It was barely big enough to squeeze into, with a sharp bend between the opening and the slightly wider dead end. No one would find him here without coming in, and there was enough room for him to sit, lean against the bulkplate behind him, and rest.
Concentrating, he let just enough of a flash leak out between his fingers to be bearable in the confined space. Don’t get too used to the spark, Fergus, he told himself. You don’t know what else it’s doing to you.
He checked the corridor again, listening intently for any sounds beyond the hiss and drip and hum. And when they do come? he wondered, retreating back into his hideaway. What then?
He imagined he could hear crickets again in the distant, distressed whine of the machinery around him. Crickets chirping and chirping, insistent, like . . .
. . . like the chime on his handpad. He pulled it out and stared stupidly at it. Scottie:
your man was just by, the pop-up read, Alena’s stylized “A” watermark behind it, accompanied by a photo of a very skittish-looking Luceatan man.
Couldn’t stop by before I went to the stupid medical booth, could you?
Shutting the handpad down, he barely resisted throwing it away into the darkness.
It wasn’t long before he began to hear the sounds of boots. Crouching in the sweltering shadows, his tattered and filthy Firebowl shirt plastered across his body, he considered what an absolutely dumb way his life was about to end: half-drowned in the steamy air, armed with nothing but spoons.
“These seekers are fucking useless down here with all this steam,” someone said, not far away at all.
As the squad passed, their lights flicked up and across the walls and floor, barely touching the edges of his niche. “Somewhere in this vicinity, sir,” someone else said, and he heard the familiar buzz of guns powering up as the lights faded. He thought that the voice now came from past his hiding place, around the next turn down the corridor.
Go! he told himself. He inched his way out of the niche and crept along the wall back toward the gate, away from the soldiers.
It was impossible to see, and he didn’t dare make light. Concentrating on remembering the path here, he stepped lightly along it, turn by turn, unerringly back the way he had come. He only forgot one last small puddle, stepping in it with a faint, low splash. A voice called out from around the corner ahead, sounding young and scared. “Sir? Is that you?”
Of course they’d left someone guarding the gate.
Fergus froze midstep, trying to decide what he should do, and heard the buzz of the soldier’s gun. He flattened himself against the wall around the corner and stood as still as he could, hardly daring to breathe. Listening intently, he heard a cautious bootfall. Damn, damn, damn. He was trapped. How long until the rest of the squad turned around?
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